Dynamic duo launch into a leviathan

Director Jonathon Kent and actor Ian McDiarmid at a rehearsal room at the National Theatre in LondonPhoto: Jane Mingay

By Jasper Rees

5:32PM BST 31 May 2011

Has a play ever had a longer gestation? Ibsen first started thinking about Emperor and Galilean in 1864 during a three-year sojourn in Rome. It was not performed until 1896 in Leipzig, then in Oslo in 1903. At nine hours, the play – set in two continents across a dozen years of the fourth-century Roman Empire – makes Peer Gynt look like a pigmy with agoraphobia. It has never been staged in English. Which is why the National Theatre can make the eye-catching claim that this month it will be premiering a new play by Ibsen.

Although Ibsen’s so-called “world drama in two parts” was intended to be read rather than performed, the playwright referred to Emperor and Galilean as his masterwork. The director to whom the task has been entrusted of wrestling its epic chaos into dramatic shape is Jonathan Kent, who sums up its subject as “the clash between the death cult that is Christianity and the celebration of life that is paganism”.

It tells of Julian, the Roman emperor who attempted disastrously to forge Christian ethics and heathen credo into a mystical Third Way. For company, Kent has cast Ian McDiarmid as Maximus, a prophet who, in the actor’s words, “believes instinctively that he’s found a man who can be better than Christ. And that’s when the trouble starts.”

The pair are used to impossible goals. In 1990 they took on the Almeida in north London and, despite having no experience of producing, jointly turned it into the most talked-about fringe theatre on the planet, attracting the likes of Juliette Binoche, Kevin Spacey and Cate Blanchett to the London stage. There was one Saturday in 1998 when its various productions here and on Broadway played to nearly 6,000 theatregoers.

When they put on The Tempest, their last show at the Almeida before the builders move in, they flooded most of the stage in deep water. They also converted both the Gainsborough Studios and a London bus shelter into theatres.

“I look back in astonishment sometimes,” says Kent. “We were protected by our innocence. If anybody now said, 'Would you like to go and raise money to become a producing theatre?’ you wouldn’t see me for dust. But then I thought, 'Yeah sure, why not?’ ”

They even thought of mounting Emperor and Galilean at the Almeida. “It crossed our minds,” says McDiarmid. “It didn’t get much further than a talk about it.”

You can see why. Through two years, 15 drafts and three workshops, Kent has been working with the dramaturg and writer Ben Power to shave the play, with its 75 speaking parts, down to less than four hours. To help, the director, who has spent a fair part of the past decade staging opera, has been given a cast the size of an opera chorus.

The two old friends have not worked together since 2006, when Brian Friel’s Faith Healer travelled from Dublin to Broadway, winning McDiarmid a Tony Award. Munching on lunchbreak sandwiches and each wearing modish specs, they exude an aura of deep familiarity as they complete each other’s paragraphs. I ask them if they can’t help still thinking like producers. They both seem to shudder slightly.

“Of course I’m extraordinarily grateful to the Almeida,” says Kent. “It was the making of me. But I don’t look back very nostalgically. It is a relief not to have to panic about the bar staff, and to be able to make demands, to say 'I really need 50 people’ and the National, brilliantly, will say 'OK’.”

It’s also a relief, adds McDiarmid, “to watch departments seamlessly move among themselves and know that that’s not your area”.

It’s interesting to note that their template hasn’t caught on: since the success of their regime, no other important British theatre has been jointly run by two artistic directors. “I can’t imagine how you’d do it all on your own,” says Kent. “It would be so lonely and miserable. The nice thing is I could always phone up Ian and have a good bitch.”

The friendship came first, says McDiarmid, who had spent 18 useful months learning the administrative ropes at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. Then the Almeida vacancy came up. “It was an opportunity to do what we’d talked about for a number of years,” he says. “And we thought if we didn’t, we’d probably regret it for the rest of our lives.”

Kent, who began as an actor, credits McDiarmid with turning him into a director. “Ian got so bored with me moaning about other people that he said, 'Oh for Christ’s sake just direct it yourself.’ I needed somebody to say that. I had always been diffident about directing because I’m suspicious of power. I can’t be that suspicious in that I’ve run a theatre and directed happily ever since.”

His first Almeida show was Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken. “Young directors quite often write to me and say: 'Have you got any advice?’ I always write back: 'Whatever you do, don’t start with When We Dead Awaken.’”

He can’t recall if he’s directed any Ibsen since. “Have I directed Hedda Gabler?” he asks.

McDiarmid tells him he hasn’t. He singles out Kent’s capacity for “creating an atmosphere where people can laugh. There are a lot of laughs because what we’re involved in is serious and important but it’s also on the edge of something completely absurd.”

Kent pays tribute to McDiarmid’s “intelligence and lack of reticence, his embracing of risk”.

There is nothing riskier than Emperor and Galilean. Were it to flop, it would flop monumentally. But Kent is a passionate advocate of the importance of a play about a clash of religions which, just for good measure, features a student march much like the one that went past the window during one of their workshops.

“This huge leviathan of a play isn’t an arid debate,” says Kent. “There is no point in doing plays simply because they are by a great writer. All productions of classical work have to be a conversation between the time and place in which they were written and the circumstances in which they are being done. Both parties have to have their voice.”

Just as they did in the Almeida’s globe-trotting imperial age.

'Emperor and Galilean’, part of the Travelex £12 season, opens at the National Theatre (020 7452 3000) on June 15